Friday, October 6, 2006

While I'm in my cynical mode (see the post below about junk food in schools) let me just say that the decision by the Flower Mound town council to pass an ordinance requiring prepayment for all fuel sales is just plain silly.What concern is it of the city if a business chooses to allow people to pay after they have pumped and thus risk losing money to drive-offs? Are the police getting so busy chasing drive-offs that they are being taken away from more serious crimes? Is the town losing out on so much tax revenue that they thought the cost of passing and enforcing a new ordinance and requiring all gas stations to put up signage would be worth it? If this were really such a problem, wouldn't stations have already adopted this practice?

If the owner of a gas station gets tired of losing money to drive-offs, he or she has every right to require prepayment, as many stations do after a certain hour of the day already. But if the owner of a station chooses to take this risk to increase convenience for his or her customers or any other reason (such as hoping for concession sales while customers are standing in line), why does the Town of Flower Mound care? Do we really want our municipal government telling small businesses how they can and can't compete for sales?